12 August 2010

One thing led to another, and there I was at the Museum of Modern Art, entranced in front of a wall of fabric panels, pages from a book by Louise Bourgeois. A book! A fabric book! And by Louise Bourgeois - the spider lady! Made from bits and pieces of her clothes, her linens, the embroidered napkins she received as wedding presents. Each panel with a line of button-holes along the left margin, where straps thread through to bind the pages of the book.

It's silly to walk into MoMA and say "I can do that" - because I can't. But quilting, incorporating bits of this dress and that shirt into a new object, isn't far off. Bourgeois put together her fabric scraps into a textured, sculptural, graphic book - I can capture my memories otherly. But the book? That book inspired lust.

If you'd like to see more pictures of it, the Peter Blum gallery has a slideshow of all the pages - and as you click through, you see the facing page, i.e. the back of the preceding page, where the stitching shows through. A blog post by Joanne Mattera has some other photos, including details of the binding edge.

About Me

It's a journal, a scrapbook, a record of my kid's childhood. It's about food, it's about the pleasures of gardening. It's where I wear my heart on my sleeve, play with words and rail at the world. It's where I muse, and where I indulge my inner magpie. I have one irascible child, and not enough time to read.
If you'd like, you can email me at magpiemusing AT gmail DOT com.